Backups & restore
A backup is a copy of your site you can go back to when something breaks — a bad update, a hack, a fat-fingered delete. It’s the cheapest insurance in hosting, and the one thing people wish they’d set up before they needed it.
The one rule that matters
Keep at least one backup off the server. A backup sitting on the same machine as your site disappears with the machine (disk failure, ransomware, an accidental wipe). Send backups to remote storage (cloud object storage like S3/Backblaze, or another server) so a lost server doesn’t take your safety net with it.
Set up backups in OrbixPanel
- Open Backups → Create a backup job.
- Choose what to include (files, databases, email), how often (daily is a good default), and retention (how many copies to keep).
- Pick an off-server destination.
- Run one now to confirm it works.
Restore (the part that counts)
From a backup you can restore the whole account or just individual files or a database. When you’re mid-crisis, that flexibility matters — you can roll back only the thing that broke.
Untested backups aren’t backups. Once in a while, actually do a restore (to a staging site or a spare folder) and confirm the files and database come back intact. The worst time to discover a broken backup is the moment you need it.
How much, how often?
Match it to how much you’d hate to lose:
- A blog that changes weekly → daily backups, keep ~7–14.
- A busy store taking orders → more frequent, and definitely off-site.
- Think in terms of “if the server died right now, how much work would I lose?” — set the frequency so that number is acceptable.
For the bigger picture (rebuilding on a new server if one is lost), see Backups & disaster recovery.